If you want a faculty job badly enough you can get one.
I disagree. I think much of the evidence about the rise of post-docs as principal investigators and the diminishing number of tenured positions is at odds with this claim. This claim is essentially why most students go to a Ph.D. program and they become depressed when they learn it doesn’t work like this about 3 years into the process.
For instance, if you haven’t traveled a lot in the past 5 years you probably don’t find travel all that important (otherwise you would’ve found a way to travel).
In the last 5 years, I’ve taken low-paying math research jobs several summers so that I could live in Paris, Hong Kong, and College Station, TX, just to experience parts of the world I had not been to. I’ve moved (at great personal expense) 3 times in the past 4 years to get out of life situations that I found unsatisfactory. I think that my thinking-to-action ratio is not bad.
You seem to dismiss the possibility that there can be real life Catch-22s. Given my preferences, I think I am in a Catch-22 and I cannot determine an actionable step. Some of my favorite life advice came from a high school math teacher who said “when you don’t know what to do, do something.” I think I am more insightful than just to wallow in akrasia.
So if you go systematically through the papers published in the last year or so you’ll find either (a) all the papers are boring, stupid, silly or wrong.
Yes, this is exactly what I have been doing for the past 2 years. But when I have discussed the option to switch to other research fields with faculty and older graduate students, they are telling me that the condition (a) is going to be true in every research field where there is actually enough grant money to finance my studentship, and that (a) is just a part of life in science and that I should be more focused on just doing programming tasks and coming up with small software developments that cater to commercial interests, leading to papers that fit into condition (a). I completely reject their point of view; I think they are wrong, and I think that if academia is set up this way, then my options are to leave academia for jobs that I think are very suboptimal or else agree to unhappily suffer through the academic hoop-jumping that I don’t like.
Given that these are my only options, I am trying to prepare myself to choose one or the other. But the biggest opportunity cost that I feel scared about is losing the chance for theoretical research and philosophical aspects of science to be a major component of the value that I contribute over my career.
I disagree. I think much of the evidence about the rise of post-docs as principal investigators and the diminishing number of tenured positions is at odds with this claim. This claim is essentially why most students go to a Ph.D. program and they become depressed when they learn it doesn’t work like this about 3 years into the process.
In the last 5 years, I’ve taken low-paying math research jobs several summers so that I could live in Paris, Hong Kong, and College Station, TX, just to experience parts of the world I had not been to. I’ve moved (at great personal expense) 3 times in the past 4 years to get out of life situations that I found unsatisfactory. I think that my thinking-to-action ratio is not bad.
You seem to dismiss the possibility that there can be real life Catch-22s. Given my preferences, I think I am in a Catch-22 and I cannot determine an actionable step. Some of my favorite life advice came from a high school math teacher who said “when you don’t know what to do, do something.” I think I am more insightful than just to wallow in akrasia.
Yes, this is exactly what I have been doing for the past 2 years. But when I have discussed the option to switch to other research fields with faculty and older graduate students, they are telling me that the condition (a) is going to be true in every research field where there is actually enough grant money to finance my studentship, and that (a) is just a part of life in science and that I should be more focused on just doing programming tasks and coming up with small software developments that cater to commercial interests, leading to papers that fit into condition (a). I completely reject their point of view; I think they are wrong, and I think that if academia is set up this way, then my options are to leave academia for jobs that I think are very suboptimal or else agree to unhappily suffer through the academic hoop-jumping that I don’t like.
Given that these are my only options, I am trying to prepare myself to choose one or the other. But the biggest opportunity cost that I feel scared about is losing the chance for theoretical research and philosophical aspects of science to be a major component of the value that I contribute over my career.